After much deliberation, I’ve decided the time has come to step down as CEO of DataSift and return to building early stage businesses. Tim Barker my longtime Chief Product Officer and DataSift veteran will be taking over as CEO effective immediately. We have accomplished a lot over the past seven years since I embarked on the journey that has lead DataSift to where we are today. When I founded DataSift, based on our partnership with…

With London Technology Week a few months back and the tech community out in full force, I’ve been thinking back to when I was first building my own business eight years ago. Many of the people I socialised with on the London startup scene at that time are now back doing regular jobs. Their businesses didn’t turn out as planned and so they headed back to the comparative security of working for somebody else. Now DataSift has offices in…

The popular (mis) perception of programmers is that they spend all of their time in darkened rooms, working with millions of lines of code, and perhaps aren’t always blessed with great people skills. Yes, I come from a programming background, so I may be a little biased, but that’s plainly nonsense. Not only are programmers capable of amazing things, creating the building blocks of modern life and business, but they are also comprised of a varied and broad…

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of DataSift’s partner portal to help marketers worldwide gain valuable insights from Facebook topic data. The portal will now provide companies interested in Facebook topic data with a streamlined resource to research and contact a partner best suited to their needs. Through our partners, marketers and agencies can take advantage of anonymous and aggregated content data about events, brand names and other subjects that people are sharing on…

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be asked to present at the Cannes Lion Innovation Festival. As the event brings together agencies, start-ups, data analysts, brands and people from across the creative industry, it seemed the ideal forum to present how social data analysis is transforming brand marketing and creative briefs globally. We all know the Don Draper style of agency executives and marketers. They come up with the big creative ideas…

According to a statement from the European Commission VP Andrus Ansip and commissioner Věra Jourová, the EU’s long-awaited data protection reform is set to be unveiled at the end of this year. However, it seems that awareness of GDPR and what it means for businesses is still lacking. According to survey of European IT professionals, carried out by Ipswitch, more than half of respondents (52 per cent) stated that they’re not ready for GDPR and more than a third (35 per cent)…

‘The Facebook’, as it was originally known, first appeared in 2004 as a way of capturing online profiles of Harvard undergraduates. It came into mainstream use in 2006 and since then brands have struggled to tap into the real value of social data and use it to make informed business decisions. Marketers analysing other social networks have encountered the same problem. Many of us will still remember the days of counting mentions, likes, hashtags and re-tweets to establish the…

UPDATE, SATURDAY, APRIL 11, 2:10PM PST Our first and foremost concern upon receiving the news from Twitter about suspending our months-long negotiations and no further interest in being involved in PYLON, our new privacy-first technology, was to inform our customers and explain the situation. However, based on your feedback and what we’ve been reading in the press, I believe that more explanation is needed. Thank you for all the words of support, but in case…

It is with great excitement that we’re announcing our partnership with Facebook to give marketers a deeper understanding into the topics that people are engaging in on the world’s largest social platform. Over the last seven years, we’ve built an independent and industry-leading platform that enables social networks to build data distribution to an extensive ecosystem of application developers. Today, DataSift is a partner to over 20 social, news and blog networks and serves over…

Internet privacy has become a topic of interest to all of us. Just recently, Google lost ground in its fight against Europe’s ‘right to be forgotten’ legislation, which gives Europeans the ability to hide their history on the Internet. More than 170,000 people have sent appeals to Google, hoping to prevent part of their personal history from showing up online. In the US, public awareness and perceptions are changing in the post-Snowden era, with Pew…